Cloudmaker
Minecraft mixed reality exhibition
FACT Liverpool
2014
Cloudmaker was a collaborative project in Liverpool funded by the IT as a
Utility (ITaaU) Network.
Our work included a research project with John Moores University, education projects with two local schools,
and a multidisciplinary group exhibition at the Foundation for Art and
Creative Technology in Liverpool.
Cloudmaker spawned a series of other Minecraft
eduction projects led by the FACT eduction team and others including Ross Dalziel.
The main Cloudmaker exhibition ran for a very busy five days at FACT in March 2014. Press:
ITV
News
Wired
This exhibition was a collaboration with amongst others:
We built a collection of interactive mixed reality exhibits for children that combined virtual Minecraft worlds with the real world:
Minecraft Mixed Reality Cave
The centre piece of the exhibition was this mixed reality cave displaying the designs pupils from Liverpools Studio School for the redevelopment of the built environment on a site near their school.
The development area had been mapped and recreated inside a Minecraft server, including streets and prominent buildings.
Different proposed new buildings were mapped onto 3D printed models of the buildings that became tangible
controls for moving and manipulating virtual twins inside the Minecraft world, using a touch screen table.
Projectors on two walls of the cave displayed Minecraft world from the point of view of another "Steve" tangible control that could be moved around the table.
ShrimpCraft
Affordable DIY kits for children to build their own Minecraft-of-Things physical devices that can interact with Minecraft servers.
This project grew and continued after the exhibition
RFID Worlds
Minecraft worlds stored on RFID cards. We built a Minecraft server controlled by traditional video game arcade style controls.
Each child was given a custom RFID card with their own players skin printed on it.
When they played the arcade game their card's id was used to seed and create a unique and reproducible
world that they could populate with models stored on Printcraft's cloud servers, allowing them to collect and store models in the world on their card.
Minecraft-of-Things gauge
The first of several Minecraft-of-Things projects, this physical gauge displayed the number of people using a Minecraft server in real time.
Night and day light switch
A toggle light switch connected to a Minecraft server that turned the server from day to night at the pull of a string.
TRLN crane
A pick-and-place "trilateron" cabled crane that operated as a giant 3D printer for Minecraft structures by building using cardboard Minecraft blocks.
